A short time ago I gave a lecture called Things to Make and Do, a title inspired by my childhood love of books and television programs with a similar set of contents, and sometimes that exact name.
Lots of people wanted the notes so I assume it was well liked. Some people even told me they thought it was good enough for a magic circle lecture but honestly as much as I’d like to make it my AIMC exam, I would find lecturing over a live stream like that to be too intimidating.
But I think the reason why people liked it was because I showed them how to make a few home made tricks, and in a world full of products, people are tired of being sold things by supposed teachers. It’s reminiscent of an inspirational quote I van barely remember and am about to butcher: We evolved to create but we’re forced to consume.
This is why in my magical girl post I included a link on how to make gravity defying socks when mentioning the costume.
When did we stop making things?
When I was a kid the TV was full of shows about creativity, which would go step by step through a specific project such as making a puppet or a decorated box, the intent of which was to teach not only how to make that specific thing but to familiarise the audience with the techniques and processes involved. So by making a decorative picture frame you would learn to make papier mache and sculpt details with string and PVA. Making a shadow puppet teaches about linkages and even basic mechanisms.
Over time, watching these shows you would build a vocabulary of arts and crafts technqiues so that one day, if you had an idea of your own, you could take those skills and enact it with a solid foundation of prior work to build upon.
Of course at the time you didn’t know thats what the shows were doing, you just wanted a Tracy Island or a Talking Millionaire Cat.
Magic is a bit like that. You learn an ambitious card routine and with it you gain a collection of skills, which can be applied to other routines. Every new sleight extends this capability to widen the possible applications.
All the classic magic props can be found by looking at the cheap section of the bookshelf in a magic shop. If theres a staple bound booklet for £5 called “100 tricks with-” it’s worth owning whatever the next word is¹.
Similarly for a while there was a spate of DVD sets from Big Blind Media with names like The Elmsley Count Project² and The Double Lift Project, which had comprehensive teaching on the technique in the title along with a number of routines that could be achieved with it.
If you look at the classics of magic³ they all have individual techniques taught up front followed by a number of routines using them. In many ways that makes them similar to books on crochet or origami.
It feels like this approach is less popular now than it ever was. Everyone seems to just want a new trick, often using a special prop which has no other purpose or even scope for theming. Interesting how this has also taken over in the world of hobby crafts, where people now opt for kits rich contain the required materials and nothing else. Premade base items and stick-on decorations.
Allow me to show a moment of vulnerability and share the story of my first ever memory. This is literally the earliest in my life I can remember. My mother helped run a play group for preschool children in my hometown because it was a way of looking after my brother and I while she was at work. I was technically too young for the group but I went along anyway because my mother was there so where else was I going to be? My memory is of a craft project the group did where we all made magic binoculars. The binoculars were two cardboard tubes from toilet rolls taped together and the magic was shiny stickers we decorated them with. Given a pair of pre-made cardboard tube binoculars every other child had been given I became inconsolably upset. At the time I lacked the vocabulary to explain that I felt that I was capable of sellotaping my own toilet roll tubes together, and that by giving me a pre-made pair I found their lack of trust in my capabilities belittling. In my sobs of tears all I could say was “No”⁴. They just assumed I didn’t want to do it.
I carry that trauma with me. Whenever I feel I can do something but someone else sees me faulter and takes over I feel it like a gut reaction. I was in my late 30s at a one day wood turning course where I was having trouble with cove and bead practice, and the teacher reached around to control the tool in my hands and I had such a visceral distaste for him taking over I had to fight back tears.
This is why I feel the low gentle incessant buzz of society at large wanting us to stop doing things for ourselves. We evolved to create, but society wants us to consume. Generative AI, subscription boxes⁵, ghost kitchens⁶, podcasts⁷, it seems like everything that used to be an activity has been reduced to a product.
Now it’s coming for our hobbies. As art becomes a paint by numbers with tools for placing coloured beads on premarked grids⁸, so too has magic become a series of single purpose trick decks and gaffed rubiks cubes, and that’s before you get into things like robotic closeup mats that mechanically vanish and produce things instantly.
When you look at huge names in magic, everything they do is bespoke. You can’t just go to the shops and buy Derek Delgaudio’s vanishing brick or Justin Wilman’s collapsible printer. Those are specially made for those specific shows. When you’re big and famous you can get all kinds of shit made specially. But even the amateur can have a unique style and theme.
You just have to do it yourself. Badly at first, but you’ll get better – just like your double lift.
Start small with props, sound effects or accessories and next thing you know you’ll be sewing your own gimmicks, music and costumes.
Believe in yourself and just make it (until you make it).
¹ Even Derren Brown owns a thumbtip. I can’t prove it, but I’m 100% certain.
² If you will allow me to soapbox on a tangent every so briefly, I do feel that including the Bullet Party Count in the Elmsley Count project was a mistake. If they didn’t have enough material with the Ghost Count and the Jordan count they could easily have added another Elmsley classic like the Everchange count used in Dazzle. There inclusion of the Bullet Party Count was, in my opinion, a bit of ego stroking for Jon Bannon.
³ For the purposes of this blog, the classics are Bobo’s Modern Coin Magic, Royal Road To Card Magic by Hugard and Braue, and Corinda’s 13 Steps to mentalism.
⁴ This is why I was too young for the group.
⁵ I was going to say meal subscription boxes which come with pre measured ingredients and step by step by step instructions, preventing people from learning any deeper understanding of cookery, but subscription boxes in general turn even the activity of shopping into something done for us as a product. Here’s £30 of stuff every month, that’ll be £50. You don’t even have to choose it.
⁶ So I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting a nice meal cooked for you as a treat, and the convenience of delivery is also pleasant. But the depersonalisation of the food delivery apps has led to the rise of blank fronted delivery only restaurants which masquerade as hundreds of different outlets, offering the same 20 or so dishes, falsifying the notion of choice or having a favorite place to get crispy chili beef. This is the entire social experience of eating out flattened into a white box product.
⁷ Hear me out on this. In an increasingly isolated society we seek the fulfillment we once would have obtained from social interaction from a new burgeoning trend in parasocial connections. Watching twitch streams replaces watching a friend or older sibling trying to beat a video game, celebrity obsession replaces school and workplace crushes, and podcasts are the most insidious of all, making people feel like part of a conversation they can’t actually participate in. I have attempted to start a podcast several times and each time it went exactly the same: I have a friend I enjoy interacting with, we both think that other people may also enjoy our conversations, but put a microphone in front of me and I feel a sudden need to provide some kind of informational value for the listeners. This manifests as creating a list of topics to cover, which causes the conversation to skew in an awkward way that no one would enjoy listening to. I’m glad I never got good at it because the idea of being someone’s surrogate social circle now makes me cringe so hard I almost develop a second arsehole.
⁸ Seriously have you seen this shit? They call it diamond painting and I can’t get my head around it. A few years ago I was into hama bead for physically manifesting pixel art, but the idea of just filling in a predrawn grid seems dull as hell. Worse still if you search for Diamond Painting on YouTube, you’ll find hundreds of hours of people doing it so you don’t have to. At least with paint by numbers you learned brush skills. Now you can just sit back and watch someone tediously follow a pattern to fill a grid with tiny plastic stick on beads. Maybe in 30 years they’ll invent a machine that watches it for you so you won’t even have to do that.